Jun 15, 2003, 10:02 AM
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how come department?
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I was just standing out on my balcony 10 feet abocve the ground, and I brushed an ANT off the railing. The little critter went into freefall and hit the pavement below, and just walked off...not even limping. He didnt have a helmet...and no concussion. Not a bruise as faras I could see. Hewas about 1/4 inch in length, and that means he was falling the equivilent iof a 5 ft man falling from 2000 feet. How come he didnt splat as a man would have from 400 times his body length? It doesnt seem fair...the little varmin didnt even have to pack.... Gosh it must be nice. Bill Cole
Jun 15, 2003, 6:01 PM
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Re: [chuteless] how come department?
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Well first of all the little ant only fell about 10 ft and not 2000. Nat'l Geographic had something about this several years back. It has to do with the weight and size of the animal. The article claimed that a mouse could walk away from a 1000 ft fall. We're bigger and heavier, our luck doesn't stretch as far.
Jun 15, 2003, 6:44 PM
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Re: [airtwardo] how come department?
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It could be, That the ant in question has never studied Quantum physics...
Possibly: the ant is only little, which makes it hard to see at a distance, so its velocity is hard to measure with the naked eye.
When it hits the ground, its position is measured very precisely (it's on the ground, duh) and it can borrow momentum from the Uncertainty Relation and have the universe decide it didn't hit that hard at all.
/me falls off chair as the one actual physicist in the room reads over his shoulder and beats him to death with a whiteboard...
Jun 17, 2003, 6:52 PM
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Re: [chuteless] how come department?
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Interesting thought.
I have my theory. An ant comes in three segments: head, thorax and abdomen. And the ant has six legs.
I guess the ant looks kinda like this simple schematic: Side View OOO \\ii//
Front view O \/
It looks to me remarkably like a 3-cell canopy. Since the ant breathes through it's skin (upper and lower) it is, in fact, a nature's miniature square. Come to think of it, it's elliptical.
The legs represent the lines. By moving the legs and articulating the cells (Hmmm. Articulating Canopy Cells. I need to patent that idea) it changes the shape of the airfoil for a proper flare. He only needs A and B lines.
The legs, all six of them, can operate as nature's plf. As opposed to the five pointed PLF, that little guy has SIX points of contact.
Taking into account wingloading ( roughly .01 grams/mm2) you have a docile, though low performance, canopy that flies slow and flat, much like you saw the little fucker fly.
We could learn things from mother nature. Maybe that's why nature didn't give the little guy wings.
Jun 23, 2003, 3:20 PM
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Re: [airtwardo] how come department?
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Trust me, the poster knows EXACTLY why Mr. Ant made it sans a rig!
I think the question's been answered, but I got into a conversation about this stuff with a jumper before I had even thought about leaving a perfectly good airplane. We're both technical/math (read: geek) kind of guys, so I found it quite interesting.
It's true, the ant's TV is much slower than ours. We're just too dense. What I found funny is that this guy has heard that a cat's chance of surviving decreases as it falls from 0-80 ft (8 stories). Once it's above 80 ft it's chances start increasing. The cat reaches TV at around 80 ft and it stops accelerating. The cat then relaxes as that feeling of 9.8m/s^2 isn't affecting it anymore and it prepares for a solid landing. The cat is prefectly capable of surviving a 70 ft drop, but it's freaking out so bad on the way down failiing it's limbs that it won't hold still long enough to prepare for a good landing. I guess there's enough data gathered from cats falling from high-rise apartment buildings to back this up. I hope so at least -- I'd hate to think we know this due to drunken physics students running amok in the biology department.
Although, given that buttered bread always lands butter side down, and cats always land on their feet, the question of what lands on bottom when you tape buttered bread to a cat's back still remains to be answered.
Jul 4, 2003, 1:14 AM
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Re: [GigaBuist] how come department?
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Although, given that buttered bread always lands butter side down, and cats always land on their feet, the question of what lands on bottom when you tape buttered bread to a cat's back still remains to be answered.
Waiter....bring my friend here another.
And what ever it is he's having...bring me a double!!
Trust me, the poster knows EXACTLY 
